That haunting memory was already making me feel queasy, but sometime between a parade float for the local church and a tractor covered in Christmas lights, I saw him.
On the opposite side of the street, Denver Wells was at the parade. With another girl. A pretty petite blonde I’d never seen before. His arm around her waist, her head resting on his shoulder.
My heart stopped, seizing with a stabbing pain. Shutting my eyes, I focused on my breathing, scared I was about to die from a heart attack at nineteen.
When I could finally form a sentence, I turned to Cass. “I need to go home.”
“Oh,shit. Are you okay?” She looked me up and down worriedly. “You look…rough. Come on, I’ll take you.”
“No, I can go alone. It’s fine. I’m fine. I just…Fireball isn’t sitting well. Fresh air.”
Ignoring that we were outside, surrounded by fresh air, Cassidy nodded slowly. “Okay…text me when you’re home, yeah?”
“Yeah.” I nodded aggressively, already spinning to escape this personal hell.
This is why I don’t come home.
I lied to my parents the Christmas before and said I didn’t feel comfortable driving on the winter roads to come home for only a few days. Mom cried. The truth was I couldn’t bring myself to leave my bed. When Cassidy left two days after the abortion, I called Denver.
He didn’t answer.
And that was the first time my life fell apart. I lay in bed sobbing, sleeping, and hating myself. For the entirety of Christmas break, I survived off saltine crackers and slept upwards of sixteen hours a day.
When school started, I tried my best to go to class, but more often than not I simply couldn’t. I was failing, at risk of losing my scholarships and my seat in the program. I’d lost twenty pounds. And I only hated myself more with each passing day—both for ruining my own life in every possible way, and for lying to my friends and family. Sending cheerful texts daily while lying in bed with bloodshot eyes and matted hair.
Finally my roommate, Ashley, stepped in. She drove me to the hospital to be admitted, contacted each of my professors individually, and cleaned my dorm room while I was gone. When my grippy sock vacation came to a bittersweet end a couple weeks later, she set up a wall calendar in my room with reminders for medications and therapy appointments.
Ashley was there when it should’ve been Denver.
And I didn’t know if I could ever forgive him.
So seeing him happy and carefree only one year laterkilled me. I stormed through the crowd, desperate to get as far away as possible from this parade. This town. Him. All of it.
“Blair,” he shouted my name. Convinced it was my imagination, I didn’t look back, breaking into a jog as the end of the parade route came into view.
“Blair,” he said again, closer this time. And he grabbed my arm as I rounded the corner at the end of Main Street.
Lip already quivering, I turned to look at him.
“You’re home.” For some reason, it seemed like there was a glimmer of hope in his eye. “I was starting to think you’d never come back.”
“Yeah, well…life got busy.” I faked a half-smile.
“How…uh, how are you?”
“I’m fine.”
No need to ask him the same question. He’sclearlydoing great.
“Good. Good, I’m glad.” He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing along the column of his throat. “Chief misses you. Should come by and see him while you’re in town.”
Biting my lower lip, I let my eyes meet his for a split second, and that was all it took for me to be sucked in. Deep brown eyes I’d spent so much time lost in. But he was here with somebody else, and she could probably give him all the things I couldn’t.
“I’m not staying long, so I won’t really have time,” I said quietly. “And I should go home now.”
He stepped toward me, stealing the air from my lungs and stilling the world around us. Time stopped with him—always had.
“I miss you,” Denver whispered.
